Posts Tagged ‘evolution
Spam Computers getting smarter and smarter
Click to embiggen
We had to show you the above spam comments caught in the filter, because we almost approved them. The spam computers are evolving rapidly, like SkyNet or those little alien do-dads in the under-appreciated Agent Mulder/Stifler/Julianne Moore laffer Evolution (a movie you’ve probably never seen that had a three-eyed smiley face for a poster).
The only reason we caught them, in fact, is because they came in at the same time, hitting different threads one after the other, saying almost the same thing. We were just about to approve the first one when we saw the other two below it and realized they were all trying to get linked to that Squidlyboo! site.
This is a great example of why we keep asking you get to avatars (but some of you still refuse to listen).
As smartly written as these spam comments are (whoever sent them knew this was a political site…and so the comments talk about Rahm Emanuel and the Mayor’s race so they seem legitimate at first…instead of the usual Asian spam in poor English talking about nonsense or lifting whole paragraphs from Jane Eyre or the encyclopedia to try to seem like English text), notice there are no avatars…just the automatically-generated ones from WordPress (which have switched to video game characters for some reason, as WP did an update and changed alot of things on the backstage area of the site).
Avatars would have taken care of these spam comments without us having to read them…and try to figure out if they were real or not.
This really was like taking a multiple choice test written by a very crafty professor.
We have to hand it to this spammer, because it was well-done. Still didn’t trick us, but he/she/it came damn close.
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UPDATE: Someone asked what happens if spam comments get through.
None of us are computer experts, so if we are wrong on this, please tell us in comments, but we believe that if spam like this gets through it’s a way for the spammer to trick people into coming to that Squidlyboo site.
Look in the screengrab and there’s that address the spammer wants you to go to. If someone clicks on the spammer’s name in the comment, then the person who clicks would be taken to that squiddlyboo site.
There might be a few reasons the spammer wants you to go there.
It could be that they are trying to drive hits to that Squid site because they need to increase their hit counts to get better ad revenue rates…where the more hits they get, the more they can make off the site (in case you are curious, WP does NOT allow ads so we make nothing off HB despite getting a lot of traffic…so it’s a massive lost opportunity for us here that makes us fund this out of pocket instead of getting that adstream).
It could also be that the spammer has that squid site set up as a data miner or malware promoter, so if you go there your computer gets infected.
It could also be a scam site like that Nigerian prince thing where idiots are tricked into giving them sensitive information and then they steal your identity or CC number. For instance, if someone was dumb enough to try to buy the Fisher Price toy that’s linked to in one of those posts, and that fool but his credit card in there, then this spammer now has your cc and will probably go wild with it.
There has to be some monetary reason these spammers keep trying to put all these links here all day. Something like 250,000 of these spam attempts have been stopped by the spam filter. There’s at least a couple hundred of these things sitting in the spam queue every single day. If we get busy and are running around Chicago and if Chrissy or Eric are busy on their coasts, then in just two or three days there are 1,500-2,000 messages for us to scroll through if someone is not sitting here deleting them every hour.
That’s why we keep asking nicely, again and again and again, for people who are being stubborn to get an avatar. The avatars let us just delete everything in the spam queue that we don’t automatically identify as a real and legitimate avatar. That means we don’t have to read things like the above and puzzle over whether they are live or memorex.
BIZARRE: "Experts" can't find where the oil went in the Gulf. Did it just get Hope and Changed away?
This is truly bizarre: “experts” can’t find where the oil went in the Gulf.
Years ago, one of us freelance project managed something for the City of Chicago involving water that was mysteriously appearing and killing trees in one of the parks. He had to call in hydrologists and plant experts and the like, and one of the most interesting aspects of all of it was discovering a whole field of people who do nothing else all day but think about where water goes, and how it moves as a predictable system based on various factors they could input into their computers.
Do “experts” really not know all that much about the oceans if they can’t determine where all the oil from the Gulf deepwater leak went?
Humans have been working with oil for a fair amount of time now, and they’ve been studying the oceans for much, much longer. We remember the nuns back in Catholic School teaching us about the various currents, in the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic, Pacific, etc. They had colorful maps and charts that illustrated where these currents went. Perhaps someone should send these to the “experts”. If any of those nuns are still around, they should be consulted on this, too, because it seemed like if we followed the currents, then something that was in the Gulf would be carried away along those currents and end up at a fairly predictable place.
Since oil is not a solid, but a liquid, like water, predicting where it ends up might be more complicated than looking for rubber ducks that were dumped off a large freighter (which happened in the 80s…and provided scientists will all sorts of data on how the currents worked and where detris in the oceans ends up). But, we just think it’s bizarre the “experts” are stumped on where all this oil is.
“It disappeared” or “something drank it” are not good enough answers.
Though, we’ve always said that eventually SOMETHING would evolve to eat petroleum products that are supposedly accumulating into a giant garbaged dump in the middle of the Pacific. We saw a special once about this place that plastics supposedly go, that traps all sorts of animals who are too stupid to get out of the way. That’s where all of those plastic rings from soda packs are strangling all sorts of things, apparently. With all of that material out there, it just seems obvious that some kind of bacteria or critter would evolve to feast on all of it as a food source in due time. That’s what seems to happen to everything else in the ecosystem. Looking at the course of life on this planet, that’s happened time and time again where some pressure forced organisms to adapt, survive, and thrive.
Some animals we have today won’t survive this or that event, but new animals will emerge that will do just fine.
Has something really slurped up all that oil?
Where’s Oprah? Did she think it was chocolate syrup? Have scientists finally found a use for that woman to equal her Media hype?
Or, are “experts” just in dire need of nuns to whip out the maps and graphs and explain ocean currents well enough to find all the oil?
What do you think is going on?
